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We just fixed a Meta refresh, unified our link profile and now our rankings are going crazy

Crazy in a bad way!
I am hoping that perhaps some of you have experienced this scenario before and can shed some light on what might be happening.
Here is what happened:
We recently fixed a meta refresh that was on our site's homepage. It was completely fragmenting our link profile. All of our external links were being counted towards one URL, and our internal links were counting for the other URL. In addition to that, our most authoritative URL, because it was subject to a meta refresh, was not passing any of its authority to our other pages.
Here is what happened to our link profile:
Total External Links: Before - 2,757 After - 4,311
Total Internal Links: Befpre - 125 After - 3,221Total Links: Before - 2,882 After - 7,532
Yeah....huge change. Great right? Well, I have been tracking a set of keywords that were ranking from spots 10-30 in Google. There are about 66 keywords in the set. I started tracking them because at MozCon last July Fabio Riccotta suggested that targeting keywords showing up on page 2 or 3 of the results might be easier to improve than terms that were on the bottom of page 1. So, take a look at this. The first column shows where a particular keyword ranked on 11/8 and the second column shows where it is ranking today and the third column shows the change. For obvious reasons I haven't included the keywords.
11/8 11/14 Change10 44 -3410 26 -1610 28 -1810 34 -2410 25 -1515 29 -1416 33 -1716 32 -1617 24 -717 53 -3617 41 -2418 27 -919 42 -2319 35 -1619 - Not in top 20019 30 -1119 25 -619 43 -2420 33 -1320 41 -2120 34 -1421 46 -2521 - Not in top 20021 33 -1221 40 -1921 61 -4022 46 -2422 35 -1322 46 -2423 51 -2823 49 -2624 43 -1924 47 -2324 45 -2124 39 -1525 45 -2025 50 -2526 39 -1326 118 - 9226 30 -426 139 -11326 57 -3127 48 -2127 47 -2027 47 -2027 45 -1827 48 -2127 59 -3227 55 -2827 40 -1327 48 -2127 51 -2427 43 -1628 66 -3828 49 -2128 51 -2328 58 -3029 58 -2929 43 -1429 41 -1229 49 -2029 60 -3130 42 -1231 - Not in top 20031 59 -2831 68 -3731 53 -22
Needless to say, this is exactly the opposite of what I expected to see after fixing the meta refresh problem. I wouldn't think anything of normal fluctuation, but every single one of these keywords moved down, almost consistently 20-25 spots. The further down a keyword was to begin with, it seems the further it dropped.
What do you make of this? Could Google be penalizing us because our link profile changed so dramatically in a short period of time? I should say that we have never taken part in spammy link-building schemes, nor have we ever been contacted by Google with any kind of suspicious link warnings. We've been online since 1996 and are an e-commerce site doing #RCS. Thanks all!

17 Responses

Perhaps adding the links together ended up pointing too many or a bigger ratio of low quality or non relevant links to your site... Or maybe the anchor link profile is now over optimized, the loss can be due to many reasons... I would recommend checking the new link profile and also making sure everything looks natural. If all is well and are still not ranking, you can send Google the reconsideration request explaining what happened.

Thanks Bryan. Yes, I checked the link profile last night. Everything looks totally normal. Interestingly, nearly all of the added links to the new link total were Internal, not External, so I don't think the quality of the links is the issue, maybe moreso the quantity.

I don't think a reconsideration request would be appropriate in this instance because we have not been de-indexed. We are just being hit hard by the algo I think.

If that is the case, I would hope that over the next few weeks, as Google sees our internal links not changing so dramatically, things will settle down.

Like I said it can be many factors.. Perhaps making the drastic changed looks like a spam attack...

Total External Links: Before - 2,757 After - 4,311

Total Internal Links: Befpre - 125 After - 3,221Total Links: Before - 2,882 After - 7,532
More then doubled the link count. If you send Google a reconsideration request they will look at your issue and probably help you solve it.

Thanks Bryan. Yes, I took your advice and filed a reconsideration request just now. I spelled out exactly what happened with the whole meta refresh fix. This site has so many technical SEO problems that I am just hoping that it's not a completely different problem being caused by something else. I'll let you know what/if I hear anything.

I'd sure love to hear from any other SEOs out there who've ever been in similar situations!

I'll just add, Dana, that this major a change to the site will often cause massive ranking fluctuations as the crawlers work through the site and consolidate what's going on.

Small comfort, but a week really isn't long enough for things to have settled out to the "new normal". It's a good idea to keep looking for issues, but I'd also hold my breath for another week or two (or three) to see what happens as the dust settles. I know it goes against the grain to wait & see, but in this case I really think it's warranted.

Yes Paul. I agree. I have seen wild fluctuations on other sites that went through big changes. I believe this is probably an example of a time when we have to hang in there and ride through "The Dip."

"Time, Patience and Intelligent Work" is my mantra....but I also have to convince my CEO that the $1,000 we just spent fixing the meta refresh was actually a good thing. Rankings sinking like this aren't helping me make my case.

If an when I hear anything from Google I'll let you and Bryan know.

I'm sure we aren't the only ones who've fixed something technical that fixed a fragmented link profile. It sure would make me feel better to hear someone say "Yes, similar thing happened to me and now we're ricking it!" LOL - well, you can't blame a girl for dreaming! :-)

I tend to agree that it could just be a short-term re-evaluation period, but I do understand that patience is hard to come by in these situations. I have one concern - I assume the META refresh was acting as some kind of redirect to a different URL? When you removed it, did you canonical the other URL somehow? Just removing the refresh wouldn't consolidate the link "juice" of the various URLs, so it could be that you went from one form of fragmentation to another, different form.

That's just speculation, since I don't fully understand the old/new setups. If you can provides some details with fictional URLs, we might be able to dig in deeper.

Yeah, the canonical should be ok - I just wanted to make sure you had something in place. One minor thing - I'd get that up on the page - with all the JS, the canonical is down on line 436 of the source code. You'd really be better off getting all that script into external files. It shouldn't make a big ranking difference, but it won't hurt.

You do have have a dozen pages that share your home-page TITLE and META description. Some seem to be odd, near-duplicates, where others probably just have duplicate meta data. Either way, I'd clean that up. Run this query in Google to see them:

I'd really dig to see if anything else is going on. The timing could just be coincidence. I find it really hard to believe that the META refresh change alone harmed you, unless this is just a temporary bounce while Google sorts it out. I definitely would NOT put it back - you risk compounding the problem. People rush to reverse things, assuming that will take them back to where they were, and it rarely does. More than 70% of the time, it just makes a bigger mess.

Thanks Dr. Pete. The marketing team has been complaining about how far the meta tags, etc. are pushed down in our code for years. Unfortunately, there hasn't been enough evidence that this is doing us any harm so it's never been a priority to fix. I believe moving those lines of JS to an external file would, if nothing else, improve our page speed wouldn't it? If our pages load faster it could impact our SEO in a positive way

I can't prove it would cause substantial improvement, but right now it's just in your way, and you'll never know. To me, that kind of clean-up is a no-brainer, because it's no risk. At worst, it cleans up the code, improves caching (and load times as you said), and makes updating easier. At best, you see measurable gains.

As a former developer and dev-team manager, I have to say, too, that it's not a tough fix to split out that JS. It would probably make the dev teams life easier down the road. If they're acting like it's a Herculean task, then either (1) they just don't want to do it, or (2) you need a better dev team.

It's just one of those things where you're always going to be wondering if the bloated code is causing problems, and it's going to drive you nuts. Fix it, and worst case, you'll rule out a cause. Some days, that's the best we can do.

Dr. Pete, Our IT manager responded to my request. Can you point me in the right direction to research these things (I am copying and poasting directly from his message): "A few items that I noticed just skimming the forums that we willneed to look at a little closer are:

Java script that is self referencing, as both tab control and the slide show are self referencing

Alias domains which we have a number of

HTTPS pages, which for us, is all pages depending on when a person logs in."

I found info in the GW forum about the mod_pagespeed rewrite module and sent that to him.

He responded "We are currently using mod_rewrite to handle a number of things including 301 redirection. My experience with mod_rewrite does have me very cautious, because it is very easy to “blow up” the site. I would want to run this on the dev site for some time with a concerted testing effort to make sure we do not have issues."

Sorry, I'm not really clear on what the question is - these seem like general IT items unrelated to the SEO problem. The JS rewrites definitely can be tricky and depend completely on the code in question - I can't really provide a general resource.

Not sure how the alias domains tie in, but they definitely need to be part of any redirection scheme. I've used mod_rewrite for pretty large-scale stuff (as do many large sites), but it's possible to write bad/slow rules. It really depends on the scope. I'm not sure if you're talking about 100s or 1000s (10000s, etc.) of pages. Writing the rules for a big site is beyond the scope of any general Q&A. That's something your team is going to have to really dig deep into.

I feel like they might be over-thinking this one issue and trying to fix everything all at once, but I can't say that confidently without understanding the situation. I think it might be better to tackle these things one at a time.

Thanks Dr. Pete. I know this is pushing the boundaries of normal Q&A. I appreciate your answer. Yes, one thing at a time I think is a good way to go. I suggested that we try the mod_pagespeed rewrite on the dev site as a first step. I think it would probably be more efficient for us to hire a developer proficient in SEO to handle some of the more technical items. Thanks again!

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